2013 - January/February
In this issue we explore cloud computing. Take a look at examples from Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services.
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Workflows in SharePoint 2013, Part 1
If we have been friends for a while, you must know my opinions about workflows in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. I didn’t think they were very good, especially from a performance and scalability point of view. Frankly I think Microsoft should have called them “workslows.” Though, I don’t think it was the implementation in SharePoint that was the issue, it was fundamental issues with Workflow Foundation, compounded by the nature of SharePoint that acerbated the issues. Well, I am happy to say that Workflows in SharePoint 2013 are something I feel quite comfortable recommending to anyone, and I hope to make that case in this article.
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A Windows 8 Look and Feel for WPF, Part 2
In part 1 of this article, you learned how to create a Windows 8 look and feel for your WPF applications. You were shown a high-level overview of the various components that made up the shell for navigating. In part 2 of this article you will learn to create a WPF Button user control, a Message Box you can style, and a simple Message Broker System. All of these components are used to create the “Windows 8 Style” WPF shell you learned about in part 1.
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CODE Framework: Accelerating Development with Standard Views and Standard View-Models
In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based applications using the CODE Framework and the MVVM and MVC patterns. This enabled developers to create quality applications quickly and in a fashion that can easily be understood by developers of all skill levels. In those articles I showed how to use view-models and views to create UIs. In this article, I am going to take this concept further by showing you how you do not even have to create new views and view-models, but instead can use the ones CODE Framework defines for you out of the box.
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Smartassets.io: Amazon Web Services by Example
My first experience with AWS was building a prototype for a website called Attachments.me. My friend Jesse Miller and I built the site over several weekends, and hosted it on a single EC2 instance. Two years, dozens of EC2 instances, and hundreds of thousands of users later, we’re still on AWS.
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The Baker’s Dozen: 13 Steps for Building a SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Tabular Model
For several years, database developers have created analytic (OLAP) databases using tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. SSAS includes the MDX programming language for retrieving data and writing custom expressions. These tools remain very powerful for creating analytic applications. However, some view the tools in SSAS/MDX as difficult to learn. In SQL Server Analysis Services 2012, Microsoft has created a second model (known as the tabular model) for creating analytic databases. The new model brings the promise of simplified features and (in some cases) even better performance than traditional OLAP. In this article, I’ll provide an overview for this new model and will walk through a basic example of creating an SSAS 2012 tabular model database.
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Log Users in to Your Web Application with OpenID or OAuth
Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.
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HTML5 History: Clean URLs for Deep-linking Ajax Applications
The value of URLs for a website cannot be understated. The scheme of URLs can help give clues to visitors and machines alike regarding the structure of your website and well-crafted locations help facilitate search engine indexing, bookmarking and sharing. The role of URLs in Ajax applications becomes even more important as content is often changing on the page while the URL remains untouched.
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The Future of Continuous Integration
Continuous integration (CI) has stood as one of the core pillars of the movement to agile software development best practices during the past decade.
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